Life in Drips and Sputters
by Zaedah
Summary: I didn't get the trimmings. Not even the gravy. Tony and Abby moment. COMPLETE.
1. Chocolate

**Yes friends... something new! This may become a series to accommodate a million half-finished moments.  
**

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**Life in Drips and Sputters**

"Life is _not_ like a box of chocolates," the announcement of which proves that a Ziva devoid of a case is a thinker of improbable thoughts.

And since the weakest link always bites, McGee chews on the morsel first. "Because you _do_ know what you're gonna get?"

"Because every package I have ever received includes a diagram of the latitude and longitude of each flavor. There can be no mystery with pictures to follow."

Polishing off an organic granola bar, a matter of much speculation moments before this candy debate, Tony swallows cardboard and considers his partner.

"You're the death of simplicity."

Swiping the crumbly evidence from his lips, Tony stands and demonstrates the possibility of a thoughtful leer. Too long trained against such techniques, Ziva barely spares him notice.

"Out of professional interest," Tony says, "how many boxes?"

"Pardon?"

"That you've received. How many?"

"Well," the forgotten probie tosses in, "if we consider the height to hip ratio..."

"No one asked you," Tony says without bothering to aim eyes at the target. "The question remains, Agent David."

"A woman's consumption is not measured by the number, but the strategy."

And he's stopped a little short by this. Trust women to have a chocolate war plan. "Shove in the pile or one at a time?"

"One at a time. Unless the spirit moves me."

Her English, Tony notes, arrives in perfect execution in matters of spite and flirtation. It's unclear which motivates her at present. But by the fullness of her lips and the soft challenge of the gaze finally secured, he's angling for the latter.

And perhaps, in the theory of chocolate boxes, she's right. After all, some cosmic devil cues the dead body and Tony wonders if it's possible to scratch the varnish off one's karma. Because she can argue that this predictable end to their moment, so brief as to be invisible, proves one can indeed know what they're going to get. Flirtation with a spring-loaded center and no resolution.

Tony prefers to think that life is like a glass of vintage wine with a waterproof Rolex swimming at the bottom. Reality informs that life is more a cheap, dollar-store box of imitation chocolate. Indeed, you never know what you're gonna get but in the end, it's all the same dull flavor.

Flavor only lives outside the box.


	2. The Dirge

**Life in Drips and Sputters**

**2**

There is music in this place.

Notes in somber, inflexible rhythm, embracing a season of lament. There is no sheet music to this composition. Funeral marches form grooves in the dirt, not lines on a page. But this dirge, reserved for burial, instead accompanies the living. The tools of life support conduct a morbid symphony, metered pings and beeps without alteration, setting a dismal pace to shave the edges from her nerves.

The instrument of his being is the method of her dismantling.

Walls are bare, except for a false cheer to which time is prevented from adding the atmosphere of dust. A collage on cork board displays colorful messages on tiny squares, assembled in a brief moment of maddened optimism. A borrowed sister had wanted words of certainty to be the first thing he sees when he wakes. But she'd wanted a different target for his renewal.

They stopped adding notes ten years ago.

She stopped waiting for revival.

Cheerful ivory paint never brightens the darkened hour of her arrivals. Always under the inked sky. Always dodging those who care little of her reasons. Some old habit makes her look both ways, even in this place where both music and souls die long before the body. The new one, with a badge full of naivete she can't wait to jade, asks after the past. It is a name he's not heard because no one gives that sound flight.

That one thinks this one retired. He's not entirely wrong.

It is not mentioned that she still sees him, because the frequency has lessened with the passing of days and her potential. It is not mentioned that his hair has grayed at the temples, because that encroacher has never met her fingertips. It is not mentioned that his limbs on the bed make her choke, because they do not move.

The nurses position unresponsive legs, shift his head, check his lines and plugs. She curses their freedom to express such personal duty. They do not fail him. But they do her no service. Because they lay out the brain dead in the same position in which she'd found him.

The shame of her daily weakness stings only nominally less than that initial failure.

Another ten years and she'll only have a cork board to take home.


	3. Geography

**Warning: A metaphor is only slightly less dangerous than a paper cut.  
**

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**Life in Drips and Sputters**

**3**

Someone once pinned his geography to the wall.

His reputation rested just north of seedy and just south of respectable. Or so said Tina. Or Lucy. Or Gretchen. Or that stewardess, bartender or masseuse. One of them, anyway. While latitude and longitude must cross, his intersect badly. And have been repeatedly subjected to the hasty redraw, poles brought closer or shoved aside according to the shifting coordinates of his moods. And there's only so much one can do with an unpredictable equator.

His is an issue of messy geodesy.

This is the constant. His constant. The lines vary and the relativity of two poles is something of an angle to be played. Much of the time, it's almost comforting, the built-in excuse of a map unfinished. _It's not my fault, it's shoddy topography. _Besides,you don't read a map. You look at the pictures. Thus he is better seen and not dissected. A cartographer would confine him to the ripped corner, the one that never folds right.

However wrinkled, the equator remains, signifying truth, reality and all the things of pride and inconvenience that make up his particular globe. Unreliable even to him, since truth is best left to saints and reality to devils. But the rest is all him, fitfully changed like a storm's cloud formations.

In the end, trying to alter the center fails. It always does. No amount of tools can aid when skill is lacking. Still, the hard-headed are persistent. Hence the wasted decades. Fun ones, mind.

Because he goes about it all wrong. Just as a proper globe will have a miniature gold eagle perched atop the representation of the north pole, the very height of the scaled-down world, so he has long set him above the important parts, letting the bits sort themselves out in a geography coordinate system that looks more like dropped spaghetti.

Had he been standing at the center, he'd have learned he's not the center.

The equator is not a division of a sphere. It's a constant, the constant. A prime meridian of a woman. And she has unpinned him from the wall.

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**_If there is any enjoyment to be had by these random dribbles, do pass it on to the chained and starving author.  
_**


	4. Nature

**You wanted HappyZaedah? I got your HappyZaedah! **

**A little breeze called Sandy is to blame for the delay and my cold. Hope all are safe and dry.  
**

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**Life in Drips and Sputters**

**4**

It was a dark and stormy night.

Well, in actual fact it's a bright and sunny morning but the truth lacks drama. And strained effect is the only shield to hold before the onslaught of overload when one is looking at half a body. Or trying not to look, which makes searching the remains for identification somewhat like maneuvering a dump truck though a slalom blindfolded.

A preferable activity.

The legs turn out to be the prettier portion of chief warrant officer Markum. Even in their current sate of joint defiance. Knees simply shouldn't achieve that nearly backwards angle. There is little evidence, however, that Markum had been more attractive while alive. The man's identification indicates a rebellious decision to bleach the few follicles that hadn't abandoned ship, stray wisps caught straining inelegantly upward by the DMV's lens. Cameras are literal beasts, something the human eye frequently lacks.

The location of the pock-marked face that grins behind state-issued laminate is presumably in the vicinity of his head. Something Gibbs announced must be found before coffee.

Early mornings and the gruesome dead have nothing on her.

Maybe it's because her legs are, unlike the corpse's, thoroughly available for viewing. And viewed they shall be since wasting the beauty of nature is not eco-friendly. And one must remain on the good side of the environment when it promises to play a role in the betterment of DiNozzo's day.

Namely a spot of woods where a head waits the hour it takes to nearly trip over it.

Federal feet miss the protruding nose, but only while dodging the more visible root that promises a sore toe later. The root has stopped the roll. A shame, as the face that stares heavenward might have been improved by extended travel though the thorns.

There is a straining professionalism that marshals the team's activities, which doesn't mean inappropriate comments and the well-placed leer are left in the car. It makes McGee uncomfortable, the sometimes tacky suggestiveness that sees his colleagues through unpleasant moments. The probie hunkers over a ribbon-thin stream, likely wishing for a gush of bubbling water to wash away the sounds of Tony's appreciation for the curve of Ziva's hip as she crouches before a stranger's air-dried eyeballs that have likely seen her variety of beauty only between the staples.

The camera is summoned. The shots are snapped. The head is bagged. Hair fragments, dislodged on the way through an unfriendly bounce across flora and fauna, are lifted from the decaying leaves for analysis. Silly, really, since they have the entire head to study and there's no conceivable way the killer stopped to buy a bottle of Desperate Vanity dye on the way to the slaughter. It takes the hatred of years to imbibe that shade. Thoroughness, Gibbs has taught the underlings, is only silly in matters of bureaucracy.

As Ziva unfolds, the certified Grade A posterior positioned at cruel eye level to the kneeling man. If, in distracted response, the camera's shutter button just happens to be pressed, he can hardly be blamed. The resulting flash startles him.

"You were thinking," she says, backside hovering on the edge of unfair, "that this is just like one of your movies."

"Not exactly," is shoved past the Sahara lips of a man who cannot stand and still be considered responsible.

"You mean you cannot think of a single film this resembles?"

None with a clean plot. "I mean, that's not what I was thinking."

In part because her assets deserve the unhinged study of a raving celibate and also because of what Ducky is offering the greenery after McGee holds up the baggy of stray hairs. Even coroners, it seems, stand on the wrong side of Tony's sudden interest in crime scene etiquette.

"Did you know that the human follicle has three zones? I recall in school we had to study a cross-section of the shaft."

What makes Tony more uncomfortable is the dart of Ziva's eyes to, well... his belt isn't _that_ interesting.

"The what?" She asks, innocent as a marauder.

"Oh," Ducky warms to the willing audience. "The shaft is the hard filament extending from the..."

This is what leads to sudden blackout syndrome. There is no blood where mobility requires it. Her goal. She's teasing with violence now, because while the sway of her hips is carefully understated, it still screams of an ability lying in wait as a panther in the dark. Never has he felt more affinity for the gazelle.

The woods remain steadfastly behind them, mocking his lack of excuse to haul her behind an ancient tree and... and now there's a rampant lyric in his head about mammals and the Discovery Channel. God, he hates nature. And the headless dead. And partners who have become better at taking it out of the bedroom than he is. She'll remind him later that he started it. And he'll promise to finish it. Just as soon as the case is solved, the dead is buried and the reports are in.

And it need not be a dark and stormy night. Because their drama has never been conveniently scripted.


	5. Things

**Life in Drips and Sputters**

**5**

There are some places a working man need not venture. It's bad for the ego.

A screaming woman had just ruined the function of my left ear, seemingly grieving in that way new widows do. Her operatic wailing would have been more convincing had dry eyes not critically weighed the blood splotch on the white rug. Every reason to suspect her next call would be to a carpet cleaner. And then the pool boy. A woman who already knew the numerical factor of her late husband's will.

Her sticky presence made my wallet feel lighter.

Such a play at despair could destroy a man's confidence in womankind. So I entered the lab with the assurance that a smile with the trimmings would await me. The room was slightly crisp, the temperature preferred by eight out of ten pieces of evidence. Machines whirled and fizzed, computers hummed. I stopped near a little unit that did its best to excuse the zipping sound made from tiny gears. Probably costs a decade's salary.

I didn't get the trimmings. Not even the gravy.

Abby's lean body angled over one of her toys. It wasn't an unpleasant view. From the back, anyway. Coming around to the front of the table I noted that, above the mire of official tools and unsanctioned gadgets, there hovered a sharp and boding frown. An enormous thing on an ageless face. That morbid mouth was lined in kohl and dissatisfaction. The kind of mouth not to be interrupted. Above were the kind of eyes that found me. And found me lacking.

A day better spent hiding in the parking lot.

In the measure of feminine wiles, hers assembled into a storm of 'kill.' If the perp had any sense, he'd welcome the all-male population of prison.

"What?"

I'd been greeted that way on occasion, usually by murderers interrupted and one-night stands whose names I'd neglected to catch. Not recently, of course. Still, Gibbs wanted answers. But I should have strapped on a steel apron to protect the sensitive bits.

"Just checking on the progress." Witnessing Abby's gravitation toward irritation created an ill-advised loosening of lips. "To see what you're doing."

"You even know what I'm doing, Tony?"

"Of course. You're putting this thing into that thing and then it does," and the steam ran out, "its thing."

"And what's that thing called?"

"Square box of some financial consequence.

"And what does it do?" She slipped into Mr. Roger's sing-song sweater. It was an uncomfortable fit.

"Makes you look really smart." I added in haste, "not that you need a _thing_ to do that."

"Because I'm…"

We weren't far from the hands-on-hips phase but had, from the sound of it, already arrived at the toe tapping stage. I took a step back. Distance was always a safe strategy. I used to be welcomed in here. In this lab where I'd enjoyed more than one triumph of brilliance. Come to think of it, that was only yesterday. Hours were cruel little buggers. My hand gesture was meant to sum up my esteem. I wasn't unaware that it looked more like a home shopping presenter indicating the deal of the day

"The mistress of square box things."

"And you are…"

"Leaving?" I suggested.

"Glad we had this talk, Tony."

But because luck's a lazy beast waiting to be pushed downhill, I gave it a shove. "See, we're not that different if you think about it."

Her expression said that she'd thought about it and killed the notion before it could breed.

"Since I use actual words where 'thing' works for you?"

"No," I defended with sad lack of conviction. "Both experience-honed crime solvers of compatible resources. I work through visual clues and you work through thi-stuff that plugs in."

That _things_ was kicked out of my sentence gained a grin from toxic lips. Finally.

"Good boy. Now go get the criminal and lock him in a square box of taxpayer consequence."

The ego was trimmed in bruises, but the departing hug was as good as gravy.


End file.
